Main Call A Smeerp A Rabbit Discussion

I removed the Real Life examples - they were taking up a massive chunk of the page, and there's really too many to bother naming. This is a "Media Tropes" page, not "All The Real Life Examples of Incorrect Naming Over History You Can Think Of". Sometimes Real Life examples can be interesting, but not when they're the biggest section on the page.

If I misjudged, feel free to replace it but honestly, they were unweildy and excessive, and piling up with the footnotes and natter. Sweeps weren't helping all that much.

The problem is, I can't see where this was even necessary. While "vegetable" may not be recognized as a botanical term, "fruit" very much is—and the culinary and botanical definitions of "fruit" mostly overlap. Which means the tomato example is still a case of calling a fruit a vegetable.

I would have said "why not add him yourself if you think he should be an example," but I seem to recall the Archie comics giving him a background as a simple anthropomorphic hedgehog before an experiment led to him turning blue with his trademark spiky appearance.

HarleyQuinnhyenaholic

07:25:01 PM Jul 6th 2012

Sonic the Hedgehog IS an example. Sega never gave him that pre-blueness appearance - Archie and Fleetway did. Sega merely said that breaking the sound barrier turned him blue - and there are plenty of other examples anyway, like Blaze and Knuckles. And Robotnik, who never looks very human, even when Sega TRIES.

There was way too much snark and undue mockery, and not nearly enough useful information. Hopefully I've corrected that by a fair bit, but damn was I sick of seeing example after example with a tone like this:

* Ground Hogs: What the hell is with peoples' obsession with calling rodents pigs?

** Not to mention hedgehogs.

Guys, seriously. The "durr hurr hurr how could anyone be so stupid as to name (x) after (y)" in all the Real Life examples got old the first time someone did that. People usually have a reason for naming something the way they did, and just because it's not readily apparent to you doesn't mean they were stupid.

At this point all the mockery is looking less like people pointing out quirks in nomenclature and more like people putting their ignorance of etymology on display in the most obnoxious way possible.

Frankly, this snarky little snipe is pretty damn unfair. The trope invoked by That Troper is talking more about writers who didn't do their research on birds, not people who discover a new species and give it a name reminiscent of another known species later found to be unrelated by biologists.

This is Science Marches On, people. NotBad Writing. Yet the tropers contributing to the Real Life section act as if the explorers and colonists of old had all the resources and knowledge that modern biologists have. Fun fact: They didn't. And contrary to popular belief, the scientific names of creatures are not set in stone. They are subject to reorganization as new findings crop up.

I think this is one of the ongoing problems in TV Tropes, people who think Tropes Are Bad and any example in an article has to have heaps of ridicule. It's really stupid when the ridicule is unwarranted.

** The American Robin and the European Robin are, by a happy coincidence, both thrushes. But they look almost nothing alike aside from the reddish breast.

** Then there's the Icteridae, the American Blackbirds. Our Orioles technically aren't orioles (the mostly African family Oriolidae), though they do, at least, look like orioles. Meanwhile, the Meadowlark hardly looks like a real lark (of which there is only one species, the Horned Lark, native to North America; Europeans call it the Shore Lark) — though it sings like one. Furthermore, the name "blackbird" previously belonged to a European thrush that looks a whole awful lot like an American Robin!

*** Honestly, the more accurate name for the American Robin would be, Red-breasted Blackbird. But that'd be confusing too because of the above nomenclature mess-up.

Whoever the tropers were that added all this, they too demonstrated the "need" to pile on ridicule where it's not warranted. Especially That Last Troper who acted like it was a grievous error in accuracy that people would dare to call the American Robin a "robin" and not a "blackbird."

Even though that the archaic name for European Robins is "Robin Redbreast" and that is very likely why American Robins got their name.

As proof that this Real Life section is subject to Science Marching On, the fact-checking I did revealed that European Robins are no longer considered thrushes by biologists, having been put in the Old World Flycatcher family instead.

Either way, I poked through that section and reorganized it somewhat, as well as taking out some of the snark.

JET 73 L: Can anyone confirm or deny? Someone edited out the reply and left the original comment withoutexplanation, and I don't want to outright say "No, this is not an example" without confirmation. That was why I added the second line in the first place, since I don't like just deleting things and thought the Wiki Magic of having brought it to the attention of more culturally relevant tropers would be more efficient than bringing it to tribunal. I live in a part of Missouri that has a lot of "rural" people and transfer citizens from the American South, and have never heard of the term "polecat" used for a skunk (and have only seen it in reference to a civet cat in one of those old tall tales illustrated books, where it was a civet cat the size of a tiger).

Many people in the U.S. call a skunk a "polecat," but in other parts of the world, a "polecat" is more likely to refer to other species of weasel (Europe) or a civet cat (Africa, Asia or the East Indies).

That's also to what it refers in most of the U.S. This American troper has never heard "polecat" used for skunk, but given the confusing nature of calling smeerps rabbits, it's not out of the question.

RAFritz

08:03:58 AM May 21st 2010

I added it because I'm from Ohio and grew up hearing my mother and grandmother call a skunk a polecat all the time.

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